In the twenty-first century books such as Michael Uzendoski’s The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador (2005), Norman Whitten and Dorothea Scott Whitten’s Puyo Runa: Imagery and Power in Modern Amazonia (2003), Uzendoski and Edith Calapucha-Tapuy’s The Ecology of the Spoken Word: Amazonian Storytelling and Shamanism among the Napo Runa (2012), Janis Nuckolls’ Lessons from a Quechua Strongwoman: Ideophony, Dialogue, and Perspective (2010), and Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (2013), it is made clear that Amazonian Quichua-Quechua-speaking people manifest central paradigms of power and dynamic cultural systems that serve both as axes of interculturality and templates for cultural continuity and transformation. To establish the contextual basis for this special topic, we turn now to a brief introduction to, and overview of, Amazonian Quichua-speaking people of Ecuador.